Shakmat (approx. transliteration of Russian шахмат, checkmate) is a chess engine with a built-in JSON API to interact with.
Current strength level: Grandmaster, ~2600 elo (if chess.com's bot ratings are accurate)
Forever a work in progress. Never build a chess engine, it's a bottomless pit :')
Shakmat as a project is composed of several sub-crates that can be compiled independently:
- Shakmat-core: Implements the chess board, movement generation and validation, and other related core utilities such as FEN encoding/decoding and Zobrist hashes (library crate).
- Shakmat-engine: Implements position evaluation, best move searching and opening books (library crate).
- Shakmat-server: Runs a web server that listens for requests and acts as a backend to interact with Shakmat core and engine through a REST API (binary crate).
- Shakmat-wasm: Provides a WebAssembly interface layer to integrate and run Shakmat locally on web browsers (library crate).
Simply run cargo run --release and Shakmat will start up and listen for requests. As of now, this will compile and run shakmat-server since it's the only binary crate in the workspace. You can also choose to be more explicit and run cargo run --release -p shakmat-server.
The default port is 8000, it can be changed by providing the desired port number as an additional command-line argument, for example, cargo run --release 9000
Alternatively, you can compile it with cargo build --release and just move the generated binary somewhere else and run it.
Keep in mind that, due to the configuration present in .cargo/config.toml, Shakmat is compiled by default with target-cpu=native to allow as many CPU-specific optimizations as possible. This means that a built binary may not work on another computer with a different CPU unless this compilation flag is disabled.
Build and run Shakmat as shown above, and it will start listening for requests.
If you're interested in interacting with it via its API, check out the endpoints documentation in the Wiki.
Because it includes a Polyglot opening book, which is 2.5MB big, and lookup tables for rook and bishop moves using magic bitboards, which are around 3.5MB.